Episode Details

A rich shopkeeper's youngest son will not tell his dream — and so he is left at home when his brothers ride to the Green King's court, and on the road back he is pushed from the great sea-bridge and given up for lost. But a barge is drifting on the sea, and in it the Green King's stolen youngest daughter; and beyond it lies an island where every soul stands turned to stone, three marble palaces shine, and three giants wait upon threshing floors of lead, of silver and of gold. The tale is told whole, as Benedek wrote it: the giants fall to the hero's sword, one stroke each upon their floors; the stone people wake to life again; and when the false daughters and sons-in-law who threw their own father into a dungeon are sentenced by the lords to a terrible death, it is the wronged youngest son himself who pleads for their lives — and has them swept out of the country instead, coming into his kingdom by mercy, as his tale has always told it.

From Benedek Elek, Magyar mese- és mondavilág (Athenaeum, 1894–96), public domain; told in a fresh in-house rendering.

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